Locations

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
Appointment Phone: 410-550-2300

Background

Dr. Tversky was born and raised in New Jersey just outside of New York City. He attended college at Northeastern University in Boston where he spent over two years at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later Harvard Medical School conducting research. He earned his medical degree at the University of Sydney, Australia where he graduated in 2001 with first class honors. After finishing residency training at the University of Connecticut he completed a clinical fellowship in Allergy and Immunology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 2008 he received a Fellows Career Development Award from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and the American Thoracic Society before launching into a career in academic medicine. He then spent four years as a faculty member at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City where he helped rebuild the adult allergy practice. While in New York Dr. Tversky cofounded an iPhone app development company that went on to produce several health care applications that currently reach over one million customers worldwide. He returned to Johns Hopkins in 2013 as a fulltime faculty member, teacher and clinical research scientist. Dr. Tversky is currently an Assistant Professor and was appointed Clinical Director of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at Johns Hopkins. He is the recipient of a National Institutes of Health research grant.

Centers & Institutes

Education

Degrees

Residencies

Fellowships

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine / Allergy and Clinical Immunology (2007)

Board Certifications

American Board of Allergy & Immunology / Allergy & Immunology
(2007)

Research & Publications

Research Summary

Dr. Tversky was appointed Clinical Director of the Allergy Division at the Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center in 2014 where he sees patients and conducts NIH funded research into mechanisms of allergen immunotherapy and novel treatment modalities for allergic disease. His translational research centers on the human dendritic cell and its role in regulating innate and adaptive immune responses.

Indeed, knowledge about the mechanisms of allergen immunotherapy and its relationship to the dendritic cell remains incomplete. Collaborator and former mentor John Schroeder first demonstrated that dendritic cell Toll Like Receptor (TLR) mediated immune function is impaired in allergic individuals and that this impairment is counter-regulated by allergic IgE receptor signals. Intrigued by these findings, Dr. Tversky began to work with Schroeder’s group to demonstrate that this impaired TLR mediated immune function could be reversed using allergen immunotherapy. However, the mechanism by which this occurs is not known.

Our goal now is to expand our understanding of allergic disease mechanisms and learn ways to manipulate the dendritic cell innate and adaptive immune axis so that novel therapeutics can be constructed. Our work has direct implications for designing safer and more effective allergen immunotherapy used for allergic rhinitis, asthma and food allergy, as well as more effective vaccines to prevent viral infections. Indeed, one of our aims is to investigate the innate and adaptive immune interactions and response to inoculation in an effort to gain further knowledge required to improve vaccine efficacy.

We believe that TLR signaling research must be studied in tandem with investigation into allergen mediated inflammatory responses. Our hypothesis is that these interactions work in concert to dictate the phenotypic immune expression of food allergy and asthma. In fact, skewing of the immune response towards Th1, Th2 or Th17 is what we now understand to underlie a large range of immune mediated disorders and fits well with the hygiene hypothesis. Poised to interpret environmental signals and direct Th cell polarization is the human dendritic cell.

In addition to this work, Dr. Tversky conducts clinical research in collaboration with the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) using novel immunotherapy adjuvants. Dr. Tversky has also spearheaded an investigator initiated program along with Professor Donald McGlashan to develop automated and more reliable tools for performing allergy skin testing and measuring urticarial disease manifestations using novel image processing algorithms.

Activities & Honors

Honors

Fellows Career Development Award from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and the American Thoracic Society, 2008